10 African Dictators Who Ruined Their Countries

Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd

We include Hendrik Verwoerd in this list because white South Africa was in every respect a dictatorship in the post-War period, and it was Verwoerd who was perhaps most instrumental in setting up the system of statutory racism in South Africa known as Apartheid.

White South Africa, in particular Afrikaans/Dutch speaking South Africa, was extremely conservative, with strong, Calvinist religious ideals that underwrote in many respects the Afrikaner self-image of racial superiority. It also precluded, in general, the wholesale corruption that has tended to characterize most of Africa. As such, Apartheid South Africa was an economically powerful entity, although with a political system both archaic and retrogressive.

Until 1948, South Africa was a British dominion, and so its tendency towards harsh racial policies was limited by the overall superintendents of the British government. WWII, however, broke the bonds of British control over the empire, and South Africa was one of the first to have severe political links. A simmering, long-standing distrust of the British on the part of the Afrikaans-speaking white majority in South Africa found expression in the general election of 1948. Victory was secured by the hard-right Nationalist Party, and soon afterwards South Africa was declared an independent republic.

This new South Africa was led in the first instance by an aging technocrat by the name of Daniel Malan, but he was soon superseded by the much more aggressive ex-Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd. This was a turning point in South African history, and it was Verwoerd who began systematically to formalize long-standing and restrictive race conventions into law.

Although the details of this are probably beyond the limits of this short discussion, the essential elements of blacks’ preclusion from mainstream society began and steadily took root under Verwoerd’s term of leadership.

By the 1960s, the statutory system of Apartheid in South Africa was more or less fully implemented, and the United Nations and other international forums had begun to distance themselves from, and isolate South Africa. The effect of this was to entrench the system even further, and to back white South Africa into a defensive corner. Verwoerd suffered an assassination attempt in April 1960, which he survived, but he eventually did fall to an assassin, a parliamentary messenger who stabbed him to death in September 1966.

Apartheid, however, was not the work of one individual, but rather a system, and subsequent white nationalist leader further refined and entrenched that system. It would not be until a concentrated international Anti-Apartheid campaign matured in the early 1990s that the system would eventually fall.

Robert Mugabe

Robert Mugabe is spared a higher place on this list because he began his career as an authentic revolutionary, who faced down and toppled one of the most pernicious and violent colonial regimes of the age.

Rhodesia, like South Africa, attempted to institutionalize a system of racism based on white supremacy, resisting all efforts by the British to introduce independence under a system of majority rule. When, in 1965, the Rhodesian and British governments reached a stalemate, the white Rhodesian settler regime declared unilateral independence, and effectively went to war against its black majority.

Robert Mugabe was at the time a relatively humble primary school teacher working as an expatriate in Ghana, disinterested in revolutionary politics and pursuing a quiet, professional life. On a visit back to Rhodesia in 1962, however, he was persuaded to join the revolutionary movement as a youth organizer. Once inside the movement, he found himself a fish in water, and he rapidly began to rise through the ranks.

For most of the 1960s and early 1970s, he, along with every substantive black nationalist in Rhodesia, was imprisoned, released only under international pressure in 1974. From Rhodesia he fled to Mozambique where he established a revolutionary army, taking on one of the most efficient and ruthless military establishments ever seen in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Zimbabwe Liberation Struggle was a bloody, violent and heartbreaking saga that saw thousands killed and many thousands traumatized and displaced. In April 1980, however, Robert Mugabe presided over a ceremony in the newly named Harare that saw the old colonial flag lowered and the new flag of Zimbabwe raised. Mugabe was an international hero, an icon of liberation and the poster child of the new African age. He was feted, celebrated and lionized.

Somewhere along the way, however, this great revolutionary hero lost his way. Misguided, Marxist economic policies, combined with an increasingly centralized and draconian political environment, began to slowly erode his reputation, and leech economic vitality of his nation. To retain power, his methods became increasingly violent and extrajudicial. By the late 1990s, deep cracks had begun to appear in both the system and in Robert Mugabe’s political psyche. Patronage, massive corruption and an increasing reliance on the military saw his reputation steadily decline.

Matters came to a head in 2000 when a constitutional referendum was roundly lost by the government, indicating for the first time Mugabe’s vulnerability. To reclaim the favor of the masses, he seized vast amounts of privately owned agricultural land from the local white community and handed it over to landless blacks. This, of course, fill the original aim of the revolution, but at the same time, it pitched Zimbabwe into rapid economic collapse and hyperinflation.

From that point on, Mugabe’s methods became daily more questionable. Elections were rigged, the population was subject to violent repression and a system of political patronage grew that created an economic basket case out of a once vibrant and self-sufficient nation. By the second decade of the millennium, Robert Mugabe was an international pariah. The loss in lives and property of his regime is incalculable. When, in November 2017 he was ousted in a de facto military coup, the people of Zimbabwe flooded the streets in celebration. As we write, Robert Mugabe, ninety-five years old, is in self-imposed exile in Singapore.

Kwame Nkrumah

The story of Ghanaian revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah is perhaps less one of a mad dictator than a man of high character whose best intentions went horribly wrong.

Ghana, the old colony of Gold Coast, was the first British territory in Africa to gain independence, and the British were particularly anxious that it set the tone for a peaceful and orderly handover of power elsewhere in British Africa. The main question, however, was who to hand over power to. A major failing of all colonial states, across the imperial spectrum, was their tendency to retain political power in the hands of a narrow metropolitan clique. Blacks were recruited to lower-level administrative positions, the ranks of the army and police and blue-collar roles in industry. Therefore, when it came time to hand power in Africa back to Africans, there turned out to be very few qualified, indigenous Africans in a position to assume power.

Kwame Nkrumah was a modestly educated, but politically active native of Gold Coast, who rose to the position of first among equals in independent Ghana through astute organization, and a messianic personality. The British would rather have dealt with any other than him, but in the end, in March 1957, he was installed as the head of an independent Ghana.

It was not just the British who hoped that independence in Ghana would be a success. Africa hoped for the same thing. This was the age of the Cold War, however, and for many like Nkrumah, the surest avenue to social and economic redemption was some sort of African interpretation of Marxism.

Nkrumah plunged immediately into a raft of populist economic policies, and a wide, pan-African political agenda. Initially, the results of this were positive. Foreign aid flooded in, supporting lavish infrastructure projects and socialized education and medicine introduced. At the same time, Nkrumah himself reached out to African nationalists across the region, and Africans throughout the diaspora, to join in a single, pan-African liberation movement.

Things began to go wrong, however, around the peculiarly African malady of corruption. Nkrumah began progressively to retain power through economic and political patronage, and at the same time, to display grandiose visions of himself as a universal, revolutionary leader. As he steadily lost his grip on the fundamentals of economy and politics, his personal vision became more abstract and abstruse. To shore up his control of the country, he sought to concentrate power in his own hands, and In 1964, he declared himself President for Life, summarily banning all opposition political parties.

This inevitably began a cult of personality, and as the economic situation in the country steadily deteriorated, so Nkrumah fell back on a command economy, and the ruthless suppression of political opposition and civil liberties.

On February 21, 1966, Nkrumah flew to North Vietnam to advise Ho Chi Minh on how to end the Vietnam War. It was this sort of delusional sense of his own international status, and the disastrous management of his country that eventually brought him down. In Operation Cold Chop, a well-organized military coup d’etat, power was seized by the army, and Nkrumah was stranded in Vietnam. He never returned to Ghana, and this once prosperous African nation as reduced to penury. Successive, corrupt military governments would follow.

Muammar Gaddafi

We are now starting to get to the nitty-gritty. Enough is known about the notorious Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi that we need not waste much time detailing who he was, and what he did. The simple facts are that Colonel Gaddafi, or Muammar al-Qaddafi, seized power in a 1969 military coup, and ruled Libya as a dictator for more than forty years before his violent overthrowal in 2011.

In between, despite being an absolute, card-carrying member of the African club of dictators, his influence on African political affairs was not always negative. South African icon Nelson Mandela, for example, retained cordial relations with Gaddafi, despite criticism from Western governments. Mandela reasoned that Gaddafi aided and advanced the South African revolution, which he did, and so therefore, Gaddafi was a friend of South Africa.

However, Colonel Gaddafi was also deeply implicated in other highly questionable actions in the wider region. One such was his material and political support for Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, setting motion the horrific events of the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars. Gaddafi operated a revolutionary academy just outside Benghazi, the World Revolutionary Center, described by author Stephen Ellis as the ‘Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries.’ It was here that Taylor trained, Sierra Leonean rebel leader Foday Sankoh, and a great many others, including South African anti-apartheid fighters. He also supported groups as diverse as Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Republican paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. His signature act of international terror, however, was the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, claiming the lives of 243 passengers.

Ironically, for many years, Gaddafi, while internationally despised, was domestically popular, and certainly, under his rule conditions in Libya were better than they are today. Education and health care were universally free, electricity too, and fuel very cheap. The fact remains, however, that his methods were brutal and dictatorial, his personal style both eccentric and erratic. In the end, the degree to which his population hated him can be no better illustrated than the manner in which he died.

But did he ruin his country? Insofar as he centralized power and ruled as a king, he certainly left his country vulnerable to implosion once the pressure of his leadership had been released. He utilized Libya as a private fiefdom and came in the end to regard himself as immortal, and his rule as perpetual. The answer to that question, therefore, must surely be yes.

Samuel Doe

The nation of Liberia is something of an African curiosity. It was founded in 1822 as a colony for the repatriation of freed slaves from the United States, and it existed for more than a century under the government of an elite society of ‘Americo-Liberians‘. These were men owing their origins to antebellum United States, and they pursued a vigorous policy of excluding indigenous Liberians from both the political and economic life of the nation. The usual methods of nepotism and corruption ensured the continuation of this elite, until, in 1980, the lid blew off the pressure cooker in a violent and bloody military coup.

At the head of that coup was a group of senior military NCOs calling itself the People’s Redemption Council, and at the head of that stood a mumbling, incoherent and virtually illiterate twenty-one-year-old Master Sergeant by the name of Samuel Doe.

Doe was the original, overawed, paranoid and instinctively violent dictator, who seized power in a coup, and who held power because he was friendly to the United States, and because Liberia was of strategic interest to the United States.

One of Doe’s first acts in power was to gather the key members of the ousted regime, stake them out on a beach just outside the capital Monrovia, and riddle them with bullets. This was a crude public execution that somewhat set the tone for the decade to follow.

Liberia was never a particularly well-governed or wealthy country, but it was at least moderate, and government, although anachronistic, was never excessively violent. Samuel Doe changed all of that. Almost overnight, Liberia morphed into the definitive kleptocracy, governed by an utterly incompetent, and many would say, sub-intelligent psychopath. Buoyed up by American money, and kept in power by a tribally loyal military, Doe survived until 1990, after which things took a very ugly turn for him.

Enter Charles Taylor, an ambitious young Americo-Liberian warlord, who, supported by Colonel Gadhafi, began a rebellion late in 1989. By September 1990, Samuel Doe was besieged in his presidential palace, deluded in believing that Uncle Sam was on his way to rescue him. In the end, however, he was left to face a very nasty fate all alone. He was picked up by rebel leader Prince Johnston, and tortured to death on camera. The subsequent video, filmed by a Palestinian news reporter, circulated widely throughout West Africa, and can still be purchased in street markets just about anywhere.

Samuel Doe certainly ruined his country, and in the end, suffered precisely the fate that he inflicted on tens of thousands of his countrymen. The body count of Doe’s ten-year regime is incalculable, and the damage that he did to the psyche of a nation no less. During the 1990s, Liberia descended into levels of violence almost unimaginable, ghoulish and macabre. In fairness, however, Doe was probably the effect rather than the cause, and one might have to look deeper than he to find an explanation for the murderous psychosis that seemed to grip Liberia in the 1990s.

Mobuto Sese Seko

When one thinks ‘Darkest Africa’, it is the Congo that seems to spring most readily to mind. Perhaps this is because of Joseph Conrad’s classic novella, which describes a gloomy journey up the Congo River into The Heart of Darkness. Perhaps, but the Congo has always had that reputation, and often for very good reason.

Joseph Mobutu, or Mobuto Sese Seko, was the original African kleptocrat and lunatic dictator, and with an iron fist, he ruled the nation, then known as Zaire, from 1960 to 1997.

Congolese independence from Belgium, granted in 1960, was a perfect example of how not to go about it. The Belgians were particularly bad at stifling black advancement in their one African colony, and so when power was devolved into indigenous hands, it was done far too quickly, with the result that power ended up in the hands of all the wrong people.

Mobuto Sese Seko was known less for violence, mass murder or genocide than simply theft on a monumental scale. In fact, the word ‘kleptocrat’ was first coined in a press description of him. His style of rule almost defined political patronage and his brazen looting of state resources was a template of institutionalized larceny. He once asked striking troops why they needed pay when he gave them guns.

Mabuto did make a very shallow attempt to create an ideology that he called ‘Mabutoism’. His official title, or at least one of them, when translated read: ‘All-conquering Warrior Who goes from Triumph to Triumph’. Beyond the development of a cult of personality, therefore, Mabutoism seemed to comprise nothing more than the Africanization of names, the requirement that citizens use only African names and the banning of various items of Western clothing. It was all very eccentric, and in itself harmless, but in the end, it was nothing more than a front for a vast and naked industry of embezzlement.

Opposition was dealt with swiftly and decisively, and while murder was not his core business, he certainly did not shy away from it. In Zaire, Mobutu was the law, and his looting of public funds was both direct and extremely unsophisticated. He simply took what he wanted, and any shortfall was made up by United States financial and military support, provided in exchange for his staunchly pro-West position.

Things started to go wrong, however, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States did not need Mabuto quite so much anymore, and the money soon dried up. Before long Zaire was in open rebellion, and in declining health, Mobuto was driven into exile by rebel forces advancing on the capital. In 1997, he took refuge in Togo, and suffering from advanced prostate cancer, he was dead within a couple of months.

At the time of his death, Mabuto Sese Seko was presumed to be worth upwards of $15 billion, roughly equivalent to his nation’s national debt. Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, remains the most war-torn and impoverished of all African hotspots, and Mobutu’s heirs remain in possession of their wealth.

Francisco Macías Nguema

Francisco Macías Nguema was a grim, menacing character, sociopathic and all-powerful, surely the most fearsome combination of attributes in any national leader. He was the first President of Equatorial Guinea, ruling from independence in 1968 until his overthrow in 1979.

As the son of a witch doctor, Nguema was born deep in traditional West African rural life. His childhood was scarred, however, by witnessing his father beaten to death at the hands of colonial officials, and his mother’s subsequent suicide. He was largely uneducated, but enormously ambitious, ruthless and charismatic. Equatorial Guinea was a Spanish colony, impoverished and poorly run, and it was in this rough and tumble political environment that Nguema scrapped his way to the top. As African colonies were being returned to Africans, so Spain had no interest in holding on any longer to a worthless tract of tropical real estate. Power was handed over to whoever came forward to claim it, and it just so happened that this was Francisco Nguema.

Bereft of any sort of rational policy, and wholly disinterested in the business of administration, Nguema settled quickly into power as a strong man. Using the blunt instrument of violence and murder, he established a crude system of patronage, backed up by a wholesale reign of terror. There was nothing particularly sophisticated about it, and it was simply the ferocity of violence, and the lack of discrimination that kept his population cowed.

Very soon, however, his growing psychosis began to manifest in paranoia, and he became increasingly obsessed with loyalty and security. After legislating himself into absolute power, he declared war on all his enemies, real or perceived. Stacking his private bodyguard with relatives, he used it as his own armed enforcement branch, disappearing and killing political enemies at will.

He outlawed spectacles under penalty of death, banned the use of the word ‘intellectual’ and destroyed all boats in the nation to stop his citizens from leaving. He killed the governor of the central bank, and transported the contents of its vault to his rural village. He Africanized every name and banned the use of Western medicine. On Christmas Eve of 1975, some 150 political opponents were rounded up and executed without trial. They were staked up in a football stadium and riddled with bullets by soldiers dressed in Santa Clause outfits. As this was taking place, Nguema was seated in the stands, the public address system playing Mary Hopkins’ ‘Those Were the Days‘.

Nguema accused the United Nations of ‘Deliberate Cultural Regression’, although, in fact, the reduction of the nation to the level of the iron age was simply a by-product of his mental imbalance. Tens of thousands of Guineans lost their lives, and many more were displaced. By the time he was overthrown in 1979, Equatorial Guinea had defined a new low in African failed states. In 1979, he was tried and executed.

Idi Amin

Francisco Macías Nguema probably still holds the title of the most deranged African leader ever to seize power, but Idi Amin of Uganda remains the best-known of that lunatic fringe of African dictatorship.

Uganda was one of the better-run and more stable British African colonies, and without a large settler population, it was granted independence reasonably easily and cleanly. In January, 1971, however, a decade of peaceful, transitional rule in the country was shattered when a military coup brought the commander of the army, an over-promoted sergeant major, into power.

Initially, General Idi Amin was humbled by what he had done, and in his first public address, he read out the usual commitments to democratic elections and civilian rule. Very quickly this began to change, however, declared military rule throughout the country, installed himself as president and began seconding and personalizing the instruments of security. The ‘State Research Bureau’, an ad hoc security agency, manned by thugs and loyalists, became one of the most feared organizations of its type in Africa. It was responsible for the abduction, torture and killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Amin’s real or perceived enemies, and countless innocent citizens.

Attempts to overthrow his government were met by brutal force and the wholesale killing of anyone even suspected of involvement. This was typically followed by the massacre of families just to drive the point home. His victims also included opposing ethnic groups, religious leaders, journalists, artists, senior bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, students and intellectuals. Bodies were frequently dumped in the Nile River, to be dealt with by crocodiles. Towards the end of his regime, the killing was an orgy, driven by paranoia and a distrust of everyone around him. Various agencies have tried to calculate the human cost of all of this, and the figure most often quoted is 300,000.

Amin was also guilty of personal psychopathy. Tales of severed heads in his freezer, and body parts stacked in his home are all too persistent to be wholly untrue. He seized the property and assets of the wealthy East Indian community, ordering their immediate expulsion, and he styled himself the King of Scotland. He appeared at a royal Saudi Funeral wearing a kilt. In the meanwhile, he awarded himself the Victoria Cross, and promoted himself to: ‘His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’.

For a few glorious years, Idi Amin wallowed in blood, money and delusion, until, in 1979, he was overthrown in a military invasion launched from Tanzania. He was granted asylum in Libya, and having converted to Islam, died later in Saudi Arabia. Idi Amin has often been described as Africa’s Pol Pot, although it could be said at least of Pol Pot that he acted through the medium of an ideology. This Amin did not.

Jean-Bédel Bokassa

We now come to the granddaddy of them all. If one was to research the most dysfunctional nations in Africa, the Central African Republic would be somewhere near the top of the list. Part of the old French Federation of Equatorial Africa, it was a backwater then, and it is a backwater today.

CAR was granted independence from France in August 1960, and for the first six years, it was stable. It would never be rich, but seemed at least it would peaceful. Then, with depressing predictability, a military coup was mounted in January 1966, led by the commander of the army, forty-five-year-old Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa.

Bokassa was another classic example of a junior-ranked soldier fast-tracked to a senior command level in the interest of indigenizing the local armed forces. Lacking any real education, Bokassa was nonetheless shrewd and cunning, and utilizing the usual methods of patronage and violence, he quickly established himself in power.

His weakness, however, was a grandiose delusion. Yes, he killed enormous numbers of people, looted his treasury to buy villas in France, inveigled foreign aid and ran his nation’s economy into the ground. He did all of that, but as he did so, he dreamed also of emulating his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. He modeled himself on Bonaparte, dressed like Bonaparte and imagined himself a great, tactical military leader. He insinuated himself into the French political elite, and although he was an embarrassment, he was nonetheless tolerated.

Then, one day, in just the same way as Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, Bokassa felt the time had come to do the same. In 1979, he altered the constitution, changing CAR from a republic to an empire, after which he declared himself emperor. In an astonishingly lavish coronation, complete with a golden throne, golden carriage, crown jewel and ermines, he had himself coronated Emperor of the Central African Empire.

A surprising number of international dignitaries attended the ceremony in downtown Bangui, although most governments sent non-ministerial representatives. Bokassa hoped that the Pope would come, but a high-ranking cardinal was sent instead.

In his post-imperial phase, Jean-Bédel Bokassa began steadily losing his grip. The end came during student riots in the capital when he personally entered a prison in Bangui and took an hour or two of sport, beating students to death with a weighted stick. It was all in a day’s entertainment for him, but it finally tipped the balance, and the French stepped in to depose him.

Nonetheless, he was granted exile in France, and allowed to live out his remaining years in his multi-roomed villa on the outskirts of Paris. He died in November 1996.